Wednesday, July 29, 2009

My own words won't cut it today

I could paraphrase everything I've read today, but I might soil it. So I'll leave you with the articles and excerpts I've read. First, The Get Up Kids apologize for the state of emo and punk bands today.

James Suptic, one of the founding members of the Get Up Kids, has spoken out against the “emo” scene the band inadvertently helped create in a recent interview with Drowned in Sound, adding that he apologizes if the Get Up Kids were in any way responsible for what he encountered at this year’s Bamboozle Festival. The band, who broke up in 2005 but recently reunited for a tour to celebrate the 10th anniversary of their biggest album Something To Write Home About, see startling differences from when they released their 1999 album and now.

“Honestly, I don’t often think about the state of ‘emo’. The punk scene we came out of and the punk scene now are completely different. It’s like glam rock now,” Suptic told DiS. “We played the Bamboozle fests this year and we felt really out of place. I could name maybe three bands we played with. It was just a sea of neon shirts to us. If this is the world we helped create, then I apologize.” Rock Daily was at this year’s Bamboozle fest, and as our photo gallery from the event proves, there was a lot of neon.

While Suptic didn’t name specific bands in the interview, punch “Get Up Kids” and “influenced” into Google and bands like Midtown, Hellogoodbye, Fall Out Boy (who headlined both of the Get Up Kids’ Bamboozle appearances) and countless more appear. “If a band gets huge and they say we inspired them, great. The problem is most of them aren’t very good. What does that say about us? I don’t know. Maybe we sucked. We at least can play our instruments,” Suptic added, citing bands like Fugazi, Sunny Day Real Estate and Superchunk for influencing the Get Up Kids, so we can pretty much pin the entire state of emo at this point on Minor Threat. The reissued Something To Write Home About is out September 7th.

Secondly, BrokeNYCDE finally have their own Wikipedia page. Oh joy. Well first I read that their new album debuted on Billboard Top 200 at #86 which says something about the world and that it all needs to go to hell. Anyway, here is the part about critical review.

Metal Edge Magazine has called Brokencyde "fucking horrendous".[10] Thrash Magazine has called them "a mockery to the world of music".[11] Another metal magazine, Decibel, has repeatedly made fun of the band, mentioning them in a interview with the group Big Business, and once ironically referring to then as their "favorite screamo-crunk band". British commentator Warren Ellis calls Brokencyde's "Freaxxx" music video "a near-perfect snapshot of everything that’s shit about this point in the culture".[12] Says August Brown of the Los Angeles Times, "The 'Albucrazy'-based band has done for MySpaceemo what some think Soulja Boy did for hip-hop: turn their career into a kind of macro-performance art that exists so far beyond the tropes of irony and sincerity that to ask 'are they kidding?' is like trying to peel an onion to get to a perceived central core that, in the end, does not exist and renders all attempts to reassemble the pieces futile."[13]

"If this is the future of rock music, we're fucking outta here", - wrote Kerrang! in it's January 2009 What the F* is up with Screamo Crunk feature. Placing the 'irritation factor' mark at level "very high", the magazine concluded - "Thanks to their tacky, lightweight and frankly rubbish sound, they've probably only got a shelf life of about six months". [14]